For over half a century, we've been cramming more and more transistors into smaller and smaller spaces and doubling processing power about every 18 months. Now we are nearing the physical limits of the present technology and, sometime around 2020, will begin a new digital paradigm.

This new era won’t be based on solid state physics, the science that led to transistors, but on quantum information, the strange rules that govern the sub-atomic world. Two Nobel Prizes were awarded for discoveries in the field just this past year.

To be sure, there are still some problems to worked out. Quantum computing works differently, on the most fundamental level, than the current technology and, although there are working prototypes, they haven’t proved they can be an effective replacement to today's silicon based machines.

Still, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and the CIA recently invested $30 million to bring the technology to market and most believe that the problems will be worked out in time to keep Moore’s Law moving forward. Unlike the dawn of the computer age, where we saw little benefit for a generation, this new technology will begin affecting our daily lives within a decade.

When Siri Meets Watson

Two of the coolest technologies to come out in recent years are Apple's Siri, the conversational interface available on iPhones and iPads; and Watson, the IBM supercomputer that competed and won on the game show Jeopardy!, which requires human-like leaps of intuition. So what does the future hold?

If we go by current trends, processing efficiency will increase 100-fold and storage will increase 1000-fold over the next ten years. So we can expect the $3 million price tag for Watson to come down to about $30,000 in a decade while the 4 terabytes of memory it used will be equivalent, relatively speaking, to the 4 GB we get for free online today.

Fairly soon we can expect to have natural, human-like interfaces connecting to Watson-like processing power available for everyday use. Bandwidth in ten years will be about thirty times faster and we’ll be connected to low power sensors throughout our environment, so we’ll be able to access vast amounts of information about our physical environment almost instantly, everywhere we go.

Sometime around 2030, we’ll be connected to strong artificial intelligence that will be indistinguishable from dealing with a human, except of course for the fact that it will link us to the sum total of the world’s knowledge in an instant.

The Rise of the Cyborgs - When Genomics Meets Nanotech

Information technology does not exist in a vacuum, but goes on to enhance other areas. The ability to use computers to perform enormous calculations at blazing speed and to apply that processing power to design and problem solving tasks is transforming just about every field you can imagine.

We can already see the potential in genomics and nanotechnology both of which are advancing at an incredible pace and, as the nearly infinite processing power of quantum computing accelerates them even faster, will allow us to alter our bodies at the molecular level.

Quantum computing will only accelerate this trend and lead to the enhancement of human bodies. In the future, synthetic respirocytes could hold hundreds of times more oxygen than natural red blood cells and engineered tissues will merge man with machine. Nanobots will travel through our bodies, monitoring for trouble and make repairs when needed.

Getting Over the Singularity

The future is always uncertain and there is no guarantee that all of these technologies will come to fruition; or any of them for that matter. However, what is undeniable is that technology is accelerating and quantum computing represents an entirely new paradigm. The advancement we achieved in the last century will be dwarfed by the speed of change in this one.